Work Life balance, is it an unattainable standard, a myth, a legend? Or an endless pursuit towards a goal far from reach? Is it a scale that’s everchanging and tips towards one side depending on where the winds of our lives blow? Well, having asked fellow residents their approach to maintaining their own work life balance, I feel a little more hopeful and would like to share some of their tips and insights with you:
Tell me about how you maintain your own worklife balance?
“So basically on a daily basis as well as on a weekly basis I will reflect on different aspects of my life and I will try to see which aspects I have kind of neglected or reduced my attention towards, and then I would pick it up bit by bit. For example, if I’ve seen very interesting cases recently that I haven’t had the chance to sit down and read about. Instead of just leaving straight away after shift, I will continue for another hour or so and sit down to read. And at the end of the day, Every person has their own values, has their own ways to deal with life. So there’s so many aspects of life. There’s your own self, your family, your health, and whatnot, you know?
So yeah, have a continuous reflective mindset to keep you in place, in balance. The most important thing is balance. And if you skew a bit away or deviate a bit out of it, don’t worry about it. Breathe in, breathe out, go back, reassess, and stay in place.
I used to have a very ideal kind of mindset before starting a family, that work is work and family is family and that they would not overlap. And although I still think that’s an important rule to try and achieve, I realized you need to be flexible. As hard as I tried to really stick to splitting these two parts of my life, I realized that sometimes you need to give more to one aspect at a certain point in time. For example, sometimes you need to give more time to work, like the days before our weekly exam. On the other hand, if you have an off day then you’d want to dedicate it more to the family. So you just have to try and be flexible, constantly reflect on what you’re doing well and what you’re neglecting and try to adjust the time you give certain aspects in your life accordingly. It’s hard to be honest, I mean you need to study, you have the boards, you need to pass. At the same time, you’ve got the family, you have this responsibility, and you try to keep everything in balance. If you take away nothing from what I say, take only this, be flexible.” – Huthaifa AlKindi PGY2 SSMC
“I think one of the keys to maintaining a work-life balance would be to find something that you enjoy doing outside of work, that also helps in de-stressing and removing all of the tension. So for me, for example, I try to work out, not on a daily basis, but I aim for it. That’s one approach. The second approach is my time off. When I have days off from work, I actually don’t think of work and avoid being involved as much as possible. So if it was just one day or two days, I just try to dissociate, engage with my family, go on an adventure, whether it was a hike, a road trip, or just spending time with some friends catching up, again outside of medicine. I would say so that would help me just to find some balance outside of work. On the other hand, during the days in which I’m working I aim to study or finish my work during the same day. In conclusion, working days are meant for work, with a bit of a workout in between just to kind of de-stress. And then the off days are purely off days.” – Salsabeel Kilidar PGY3 SSMC
“I’ve been asked to describe how I maintain a somewhat logical work-life balance. And to be honest, it’s not the perfect way, but I actully like to mix and match work and life, instead of keeping them completely separate. I don’t 100% mix them together, but I try my best to keep work as fun as possible, and life as relatable to work as possible. So I try to incorporate my work colleagues, my co-residents, to be my actual friends who I go out with and spend most of my time with. It’s not perfect, not everyone will agree on this, but it helps to make work feel more fun, and also helps making small talk outside of work more fun, because you already spend a lot of time together and maybe some were even present in certain events at work, so it makes life easier. In terms of making it as balanceful as possible, my advice would be to try to always schedule plans ahead of time and to always get enough sleep. We get our schedules monthly in the ED and so if I have a weekend off, I know I can mess up my sleep schedule, which would make me more tired and life more difficult. Once I started prioritizing my sleep especially the day before work, those Monday 6 ams werent so bad anymore. And that’s it. So planning ahead and keeping a close circle in work and outside of work, which mixes and matches is probably the best thing I do to maintain that work-life balance.” –Amin PGY2 CCAD
In conclusion, finding work life balance is a personal and ever changing journey. The experiences shared by our colleagues show that there’s no perfect formula, but a few key elements can help. Regular reflection, being flexible, pursuing hobbies, and planning ahead all play a big role in creating harmony between work and life. Ultimately, what works for someone else may not work for you and it’s all about trial and error and making adjustments that make sense to your own life. Make sure to be kind to yourself in the process and understand that although your balance may never be perfect, it’s still the balance that fits your current season of life, and that’s beautiful.